Denver Newsroom, Sep 9, 2020 / 04:00 am (CNA).- Scholars of Pope Pius XII have countered claims that the wartime pope and the Catholic Church hierarchy were complicit in a controversial post-war custody battle over two Jewish orphans who were baptized Christians in France, then hidden from their relatives.
Researcher William Doino Jr. told CNA a recent article on the topic in The Atlantic is “both flawed and misleading, because it misrepresents and cites out of context a small portion of the newly released archives to advance a one-sided view of Pius XII– and omits key documents and evidence which contradict the article’s main allegations.”
He responded to historian David I. Kertzer, writing in The Atlantic, who has claimed that the archives have now revealed “the central role that the Vatican and the pope himself played in the kidnapping drama.”
“The Vatican helped direct efforts by local Church authorities to resist French court rulings and to keep the boys hidden, while at the same time carefully concealing the role that Rome was playing behind the scenes,” Kertzer wrote Aug. 27.
Those claims have also drawn criticism from Matteo Luigi Napolitano, professor of history of international relations at Italy’s University of Molise said in L’Osservatore Romano Sept. 3.
“Things are obviously much more complex if we look at the Jewish sources,” he said. “The Rabbinate wanted to maintain dialogue with the Vatican, while other organizations would have gone to the clash, to be exploited on the media level.”
The archives on Pope Pius XII’s pontificate were opened in 2020 for only four days before being closed again due to coronavirus restrictions. Napolitano said scholars have only had about forty days’ worth of work on the new material.
Napolitano is thus critical of the claims of Kertzer regarding the wartime papacy of Pius XII and the Finaly brothers controversy.
In February 1944, agents of the Gestapo arrested a refugee Jewish Austrian couple, Fritz and Annie Finaly, in a French village. They were transported to Auschwitz and killed. Their children, three-year-old Robert and two-year-old Gerald, were taken in by a Catholic woman, Antoinette Brun, who ran a foundling home in Grenoble.
Brun began the legal process to adopt them in 1945, when she learned their parents had been killed. At the same time, the boys’ relatives sought to take custody of them. An aunt from New Zealand asked the boys be sent to her, but Brun resisted. In 1948, she baptized the boys, making them Catholic in the eyes of the Church.
A custody struggle ensued, with both religious and national elements, citing the father’s reported desire to have his sons brought up in France, the boys’ reported desire to stay with Brun, calls to have the boys brought up Christian, and calls to return the boys to their family.
When courts said the boys should be placed with their relatives, the boys were taken by friends of Brun and hidden near France’s border with Spain.
Brun, a Catholic nun who helped her, and several Catholic clergymen were arrested.
“Several arrests were made, and the Church got some bad press. Contrary to what the critics claimed, however, the Catholics involved were not acting on behalf of the institutional Church,” said Ronald Rychlak, a law professor at the University of Mississippi School of Law and an expert on the history of Pius XII and the Nazis in the Second World War, wrote in an essay he sent to CNA in late August.
“When she was asked by the press about her Catholicism, Brun said she ‘didn’t give a fig for the pope.’ Bishop Alexandre Calliot of Grenoble took to the radio airwaves to demand that anyone with information about the missing boys contact the authorities. One of the first to comply was a priest in Spain who reported on their whereabouts.”
Doino characterized Brun as “a renegade Catholic.”
“She and a small group of collaborators evaded Church officials at every turn, after they demanded she return the children to their Jewish relatives,” he told CNA.
Doino pointed to an article he co-authored with Rychlak for Inside the Vatican Magazine’s a January-February 2005 issue, which used primary source documents and first-hand testimonies to disprove a claim he helped refuse to return baptized Jewish children to their surviving family members after the Second World War.
He told a Polish Catholic woman to return a baptized child to its father, saying it “was her duty as a Catholic not only to give back the child, but do it with good will and in friendship,” said Doino, who recommended Peter Hellman’s 1980 book Avenue of the Righteous.
Rychlak said Pius XII approved an agreement negotiated between Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier of Lyons and the chief rabbi of Paris: the children would go to their relatives in France, but would be allowed free choice of religion. The pope approved this despite some leading advisors who wanted to reject any agreement in which Catholic children would live in a Jewish home.
In Kertzer’s telling, a Vatican document from Catholic sources in Grenoble appeared to describe positively Brun’s refusal to return the children.
Napolitano, however, said that Jewish sources show that the Bishop of Grenoble and the Archbishop of Lyons both worked with the judicial authority to track down the brothers after they were concealed in Spain.
Jewish sources reported that “the French clergy have already intervened with the Spanish clergy and that they are on the point of taking the children home.”
Napolitano said Vittorio Segre, press officer at the Israeli Embassy in Paris during the controversy, shows a “much more complex picture.”
In Segre’s account, the embassy officer said it is “logical to assume that there was support from the Vatican” for the agreement of Cardinal Gerlier through the former secretary of Charles de Gaulle, who was charged with tracking down the Finaly brothers.
According to Segre, there was “never a conflict between the Catholic Church and the Jewish community.” De Gaulle’s former secretary “worked in complete freedom, without encountering obstacles in the hierarchies.”
“There were difficulties, but they came from a much lower level,” said Segre.
While Kertzer’s essay claimed that relevant documents were now reported for the first time, Rychlak compared his work to a 2004 controversy in which the New York Times reported on a document from a French archive purporting to show Vatican authorization for church authorities not to return “hidden” Jewish children to their families if they had been baptized.
“To those of us who had studied the work of Pius XII, the directive immediately seemed suspicious, and for good reason,” Rychlak wrote. “The real directive, dated October 23, 1946, and authorized by Pope Pius XII, was quickly found in the Vatican archives. It was quite different from what had been reported in the news.”
“The directive told the rescuers to return these children, baptized or not, to blood-related relatives who came to get them,” Rychlak said. “Over and above that, if no relatives survived to reclaim the children, and if individuals or organizations unrelated to the children now wished to adopt them or transfer them to a new environment, each request was to be examined on a case-by-case basis, always with a sense of justice for the child, and with a sense of what their parents would have wanted for them.”
“This directive is perfectly in line with Judeo-Christian compassion and responsibility. It is also very probative of Pius XII’s mindset on these issues,” he said, saying this is far better evidence than internal memoranda.
Kertzer said other newly revealed documents justify repeated claims that Pius XII had been persuaded “not to speak out in protest after the Germans rounded up and deported Rome’s Jews in 1943.” He claimed memoranda was “steeped in anti-Semitic language.”
“The silence of Pius XII during the Holocaust has long engendered bitter debates about the Roman Catholic Church and Jews,” he said, repeating a claim long disputed by the Pope’s defenders.
For Kertzer, one piece of evidence is a December 1943 memo from Monsignor Angelo Dell’Acqua, an official in the Vatican’s Secretariat of State, about whether it was right to openly and officially protest mistreatment of Jews by Germans. Kertzer interpreted the memo as a sign of anti-Semitism and Church silence.
However, Napolitano said the note came just two months after the Oct. 16, 1943 Nazi raid on Rome’s Jewish ghetto, which resulted in over 1,000 Jews being deported to Auschwitz.
Vatican officials objected to that raid, but were also aware of the danger of reprisals from the Nazis. Napolitano cited the diary of Slovakian ambassador Karl Sidor, which said: “On the orders of the Holy Father, more than one hundred Jews and Italian officers are hidden in the Jesuit Generalate. Likewise, Jews with their entire families are hidden in every convent. The Holy Father provides for their nourishment. Money and food arrive from the Vatican. This is very important news. This is the way the Vatican is dealing with the Jews.”
Documents from the Pius XII papacy, Napolitano said, come in the context of Church efforts “not to compromise the network of aid that had been activated throughout Rome to ensure that Jews and wanted people of all kinds escaped arrest and deportation.”
“It does not seem that Kertzer takes this into account,” Napolitano wrote in L’Osservatore Romano.
He also faulted Kertzer’s depiction of Dell’Acqua as an anti-Semite, given that the priest was a close collaborator with Pope John XXIII, who would not have named him a bishop and apostolic nuncio to France “if he had the slightest suspicion of his anti-Semitic inclinations.” Similarly, Paul VI, another pioneer in Catholic-Jewish relations, would not have elevated Dell’Acqua to the cardinalate.
“These are logical discrepancies that Kertzer does not resolve,” said Napolitano. “But history, like nature, does not allow for leaps.”
[…]
How much longer, Lord?
“ But yet the Son of man, when he cometh, shall he find, think you, faith on earth?”
Whether or not Christ finds Faith on Earth is up to us, not God . We must be Faithful and call out the counterfeit church with it’s counterfeit pope and it’s counterfeit magisterium that is attempting to subsist within The One Body Of Christ because they desire to lead others astray from The Deposit Of Faith, and create a god in their own image.
How can we “make disciples of all Nations”, while allowing certain disciples to deny Jesus The Christ?
Those whose”competence it is”, know what needs to be done to save The Papacy from the usurpers.
Pray they have the courage to call out the apostates!
Rather than be accused of gossip this comment will unmistakably be a constructive analysis. Rumor has it that Cdl McElroy is a Pope Francis favoriti. “He’s the cardinal who is most aligned with Pope Francis” (this proves the rumor is more fact than fictitious gossip).
Why should this matter? Doesn’t everyone have their favorites and their deplorables? I’d like for a minute to talk about the deplorables. Deplorables [made famous by Hillary] are a large group, moreso that favoriti. Take the US as a starter, we have Archbishops of much larger Dioceses than San Diego [where favoriti McElroy became cardinal], Denver, San Francisco. Archbishops Aquila and Cordileone must be deplorables. We also have deplorable Cardinals Raymond Burke, Gerhard Muller [Burke evicted from his Vatican apartment by Francis, Muller stripped of his staff when CDF prefect, immediately dismissed at 75, lately a thorn].
Getting back to favoriti McElroy Wash DC is likely the most prestigious US diocese, once the see of the unfortunate Theodore McCarrick. Without envisioning too far afield like the papacy that position is a type of chiefdom within American hierarchy. Since his appointment to San Diego he convened three Synods [of the Synodality kind] in that diocese, and Nov 12, 2024 Cardinal Robert McElroy has proposed that the US bishops set up a task force to implement the agenda of Synod on Synodality (CatholicVote org). Apparently McElroy will be Pope Francis’ Synodality point man and enforcer in the US.
This makes a lot of sense, that Cardinal McElroy is the point man for the pope. It’s also BAD news for American Catholics.
Thanks!! for the heads up.
Let’s pray for faithful priests to overcome the evil that is being done.
A shrewd political operator for the most political of U.S. cities. Even if this appointment seemed inevitable, I am sorry for faithful traditional Catholics in the Archdiocese of Washington who have already lost so much under Traditionis Custodes. I think of someone like Msgr. Charles Pope and pray that he, and they, do not lose more.
Although Cardinal McElroy is known for being outspoken on political and social issues, I believe the Archbishop of Washington, DC, has no jurisdiction over the House, Senate or White House. So his direct influence there is limited. As I understand, Catholic Senators and Representatives “belong” to their home diocese and relatively few elected officials claim residence in the District of Columbia or the Maryland counties included in tbe diocese. The White House operates largely by its own rules. That doesn’t mean that the Archbishop of Washington can’t have indirect influence over national political leaders, as was witnessed in the years when Cardinal McCarrick was in charge. But McElroy enters the DC scene at a major transitional point, and he won’t find the same degree of welcome that he would have found under a Biden administration.
The Washington Post will prop up his insipid pseudo-Christian neo-DEI bromides while even secular liberals tire of it.
True that.
Cardinal McElroy will get more media attention than he did in San Diego, that’s for sure. He will provide the sound bites that the DC based media establishment craves. He’ll also fit in well with the very liberal DC government.
Whether he will actually have more widespread influence to the point of swaying more people, includng Catholics, to his point of view .. well, that remains to be seen. Is the Archbishop of Washington actually looked at as a de facto national leader because of his location in the nation’s capitol? Doesn’t seem like it.
This appointment ain’t gonna play in Peoria.
The Faithful must not continue to ignore the fact that “ it is a sin to accommodate an occasion of sin”, and thus cooperate with those who profess to be Catholic, while they deny The Deposit Of Faith, which is evil.
We have Catholic politicians that constantly violate the laws of our faith and the pope tells them go ahead with receive communion. We need a new pope.
“This appointment ain’t gonna play in Peoria.”
Oh, I don’t know. Have you been in Peoria, IL lately? Really sad, IMO.
Some have claimed that many of Francis’ numerous appointments to the College of Cardinals are far more conservative than one would suspect given the inclinations of the pope who named them. We’ll see if that turns out to be true. A lot of them are so obscure that I don’t think anyone can confidently predict where they’ll come down one way or another.
There is no doubt about any of his American picks, however. They are absolutely the worst selections imaginable, save, perhaps certain famous certain celebrity Jesuits who otherwise seem very much favored by Francis. Francis has a special animus toward American conservative Catholics. This outrageous appointment is just the latest middle finger to a group of people he genuinely detests.
I think Pope Francis thinks all Americans are really rich. Of course, compared to many countries, we do have a lot of people who are earning a decent living and of course, many who are very wealthy. But we still have a lot of poor, disenfranchised, homeless, under-educated, addicted people, and we still have plenty of racism victims in the U.S.
We are not the “Beverly Hills” that I think some people think we are; e.g., “There are no cats in American and the street are made of cheese! (from the movie, An American Tail). Those immigrant mice found out that there are plenty of cats in America, and the streets are definitely NOT made of cheese!
But the opportunity to make a good life in the U.S. still exists, and we still retain many of our freedoms.
We need a new pope
Noting the trifecta election results centered in DC, McElroy’s role in the wake of woke is somehow to put his thumb in the dike, or wherever.
Normal Appointment – coming from where it does…
https://www.fromrome.info/2020/02/05/vatican-intelligence-officer-i-am-a-freemason-and-so-is-bergoglio/
“His Eminence” McElroy = McCarrick, an apostate hierarch of “the-science-of-sanctifying-sodomy-now.”
He, like his promoter-of-pederasty the Pontiff Francis, are witch doctors of “the-cult-to-decapitate-the-Body-of-Christ.”
“His Eminence” McElroy, along with all of his fellow hierarchs of the McCarrick cult, are of the death cult of the dry wood, fit for the prophecy Jesus spoke to the women of Jerusalem, when he was being marched to his crucifixion.
Every church he enters will empty out of Christian faithful.
Mark my word, no faithful Catholic will listen to a word that comes from the mouth of Herr McElroy.
Pope Francis had declared he would make a special exception for the Africans’ “cultural” attitude to homosexualism. Ambongo seems to be able to work along with consequential discrepancies but Tawadros withdrew from the theological dialogue.
So if Pope Francis has homosexualism as “not a sin” also as “cultural phenomenon”, going on in his brain, then it would make sense to appoint McElroy to administer over the towers of confusion among different localities and gravitational points?
A Polyhedron with angles and vectors like Beauty = Truth and Unity = Goodness?
You know, I can understand our Lord saying let the wheat and cockle grow together until the appropriate time -as pastoral. But the Holy Father makes no sense a lot of the time; eg., things were going well with Tawadros only then to turn for the worst.
I concede that some of the exhortations don’t clarify areas that have no apparent reason to them.
Also it seems to me that none of those called in the Nativity epiphanies right up to the time of Joseph’s departure, was told he was sad, or flat, or apathetic, or resigned or trapped.
‘ Even in the darkest nights, a star shines. It is the star of Jesus, who comes to care for our fragile humanity. Let us set out towards Him. Let us not give apathy and resignation the power to trap us in the sadness of a flat life. ‘
https://x.com/Pontifex/status/1876607215177748711
Elias. As a measure for assessment, how would Saint Francis Xavier have responded if Pope Paul III had a worship ceremony for Aztec god Nahuatl [God of the sun and sacrifice] in the Vatican gardens to be followed by an enshrinement of the sun god by a group of singing dancing cardinals in the sanctuary of St Peter’s Basilica? Why was the overall reaction by the Church to the Pachamama idolatry so mild, compared to what we can safely presume would have occurred during Francis Xavier’s day?
Satan had already gained a grip on the Church with the replacement of Aztec human sacrifice with the much greater, worldwide sacrifice of prenatal infants. Homosexuality has a strange, perhaps not so strange diabolic nexus with the murder of infants, now including the sexual exploitation of children. Find an active homosexual who is against abortion. Find one who actively opposes the sexual exploitation of minors. A rarity.
What has occurred with the placement by Francis of McElroy, one, if not the most well educated, intellectual spokesman for abortion and homosexuality, is the solidification of a strategy to totally corrupt the remaining significant Roman Catholic body [putatively the rationale for Francis’ disdain], the American Catholic Church.
The McElroy appointment is about the Mercy Alone heresy flowing from Amoralist Laetitia.
The main reason for McElroy to DC is about the need to hide the sordid history of McCarrick. Watch out Wuerl! Gregory is going to want some of the millions. 💰 🤐
Where do we go from here, Lord, where do we go from here? Only to you, Lord, ONLY to you. Having defeated evil on the cross we pray and work, work and pray aspiring to be counted with your Faithful Remnant in eager anticipation of your 2nd Coming when evil is abolished, your Good Creation restored to the beautiful you intended your good creation to be.
I am a life-long Catholic, 78 years old, who was taught that this is Christ’s church.
I find myself wondering if the Pope and his favorites really believe his. Do they ask
“What does Christ want for His Church?” or Do they have their own personal idea of what
they want the Church to be, with of course an important place for them?
As I recall, Christ rebuked Apostles who were maneuvering to sit at His right hand.
He made it clear that that was not what He was about. Have our higher clergy ever read this passage?
My take is that Cardinal McElroy’s placement in the nation’s capital is a timely reminder from Pope Francis to Catholics in the U.S.. Given the second Trump administration, the rising tide of White Christian (and Catholic!) Nationalism, and the mainly anti-abortion only stand of most of pro-life activists, McElroy’s pulpit will blast the full and complete scope of what pro-life advocacy is. Cardinal McElroy has consistently preached that a consistent pro-life ethic must support not only the protection of life in the womb but also the protection of life outside the womb. Expounding Catholic Social Teachings on the sanctity of life, McElroy asserts, that Catholics are to live out their pro-life commitments in ways that reflect compassion, justice, and solidarity. This vision goes beyond merely opposing abortion or euthanasia; it encompasses a comprehensive approach that sees the life and dignity of each person as sacred, from conception to natural death, and it calls Catholics to act on behalf of those who are often disregarded by society. This means standing up for policies that defend the lost, the least, and the last, such as advocating for humane immigration policies, racial justice, and ensuring that LGBTQIA+ individuals have the same rights and dignity as others in society. Being the U.S. bishop most aligned with Pope Francis in environmental justice advocacy, Cardinal McElroy has also shown that ecological work is deeply intertwined with the pro-life movement, as the health of our environment directly impacts the dignity and survival of all life on Earth. Filling in what is often lacking in most pro-life advocacy initiatives and echoing Pope Francis, Cardinal McElroy proclaims the Catholic Social Teaching that the pro-life stance is not confined to opposing abortion or protecting the unborn; it extends to defending life in all its forms, and that includes caring for the planet that sustains all life.
Catholics in the Archdiocese of Washington will pay attention to Cardinal McElroy’s appointment but “Catholics in the US” probably.won’t. Because he has no jurisdiction over them. The head of the Washington Archdiocese not acquire any national standing simply because he is seated in the national’s capitol. This limits his ability to be the kind of transformative figure you are imagining.
Given that Cardinal Gregory also supports most of the positions cited above, there may not be many dramatic changes. McElroy may be more outspoken and may grab more media attention; whether he will be more assertive in making changes to the archdiocese remains to be seen, but his changes will be to the Archdiocese of Washington, and will not apply to the country as a whole.
And there are a lot of liberals and progressives in the DC area saying saying more or less the same things that Cardinal McElroy is saying, so he is not going to stand out as much as you may imagine.
This extended screed of sycophancy sounds as if McElroy wrote it himself.
I don’t think people should be segregated or categorized by alphabet letters or by other inventions like “race” Deacon Dom. We’re just human beings and from a biblical perspective, we are all instructed to obey the same Commandments. We can each struggle dufferently to keep the Commandments and Christ’s teachings. Some teachings are going to be harder for us than others but that doesn’t create special exemptions based upon our attractions or temptations.
More nonsense from the “Deacon” named Dom.
Cardinal McElroy is a leftist social justice warrior, Deacon. He does have that it in common with Pope Francis. I’m surprised (not really) that you didn’t mention that, like Francis, the good Cardinal has covered for molestors and had, and maybe still has, a great relationship with Ted McCarrick.
Deacon, would being pro-life include not repeating the childishly silly lies pro-aborts and the morally indifferent have been saying about pro-lifers?
Exactly what line of reasoning goes into creating the belief that being a parent or doctor or nurse or teacher or legislator or administrator or homemaker or cook or waiter or builder or truck driver or construction worker or anyone from any other background within the pro-life movement, would preclude having the human compassion you infer that pro-lifers do not have for anyone after they are born? Incidentally, pro-lifers are not only racially white as you also infer. And we also care about thousands of things.
What exactly have you done? Do you provide material aid for abortion turnarounds like we do, or do you just prefer to stereotype us and denigrate us while simultaneously lecturing us about learning “compassion.”
Deacon: Does caring for life also include caring for the victim of a depraved priest raping his victim in satanic rituals or brushing her aside as McElroy has done? Or does “mercy” include caring for and having mercy for the victims of a depraved serial rapist of nuns or protecting the rapist as Francis has done?
Is Jesus God incarnate? Is the Son of God the head of the Church? Although there are disconcerting events and actions in the physical Church, we cannot always discern the workings of the Trinity in this life or in the Church. Trust in God, trust in Christ, trust in the Holy Spirit. Let your faith be authenticate, your life holy from grace, your conscience clear, and serve and love others. May what is True and Good prevail in church life.
McElroy, Cupich, and Tobin have to be “elevated” by Francis if they are going to have any influence. Their brother bishops sure don’t seem inclined to give them any influential roles in the USCCB. They are like the teacher’s pet despised by the rest of the class.
The “elevation” of McElroy to the DC archdiocese will not elevate him; it will only degrade DC.
Trump will get the better of any match with McElroy.
After reading the article I thought, “What a whitewashed piece of journalism this is.” Then when I saw it was written by Hannah Brockhaus of CNA, I understood. CNA does not want Catholics to know how people like McElroy, Francis, and others cover up abuse. CNA never reports on seminarians who are drugged and sodomized like Mark Brooks was in San Diego, or Rachel Mastrogiacom whose ritual satanic abuse McElroy attempted to cover up.
Msgr., I’ve been saying for awhile now that what comes to us from CNA is utter trash. It’s a propaganda agent for Bergolioistas.
Have you been granted a declaration of nullity by a Diocesan Tribunal for your “marriage” to Leila, Gene and have you resumed presenting yourself as a Catholic Priest or do you prefer the title “Dad”?
Woke Doctorates be dammed!
At a web site where a fawning interview of the Cardinal occurred, where he went on and on preaching his pseudo-gospel of “inclusiveness,” I posed these comments.
It seems an incapacity to make rational distinctions is now the necessary criteria for becoming a cardinal in this pontificate. Oh, I forgot. The ability to not be inclusive towards the damaged victims of the savage sinful sexual crimes, ritual satanic abuse in one case, by priests that you, Cardinal covered up, that’s right, what you have systematically ignored. Why doesn’t “inclusiveness” seem to “include” the victims of grave sins??